This is bad news for any­one craft­ing email cam­paigns, but hon­estly, if I read one more com­ment where peo­ple plain­tively insist that email is only ever meant to be sent as reg­u­lar text, I just might scream. Go back to break­ing tex­tile machines and accept­ing union-defined min­i­mum wages, seri­ously. I find it so hard to believe that any of these peo­ple are able to hold down seri­ous jobs as sysad­mins when they are so com­pletely obliv­i­ous to the requirements/desires of the peo­ple they’re employed to pro­vide these ser­vices to.

Yes, rich (HTML/RTF/whatever this new crap Out­look 2007 is pulling is) email can be hor­ri­bly messy. Yes, it is a require­ment. Yes, if you think text-only is the way to go, you need to pull your head out of the sand. Wel­come to the twenty-first century.

The clos­est I’ve come to some­one who thought like that was a chap who was adamantly against the idea of con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems. I jest not, but in my mind that’s less seri­ous an offense than sug­gest­ing that all con­tent on the web should con­sist solely of text and links, “because that’s the way it was designed”. That is, in essence, what these sysad­mins (and some other open-source big­ots — we should all use Mutt and Pine — who prob­a­bly haven’t much expe­ri­ence with the cre­ation or deliv­ery of such things) are arguing.

Tags: content management, content management systems, HTML